


But in another Countrey, as he said, Bore a bright golden flowre

by lotesse



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman
Genre: Drabble Sequence, F/M, Possibly Unrequited Love, Snapshots, Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:00:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: Drabbles exploring the relationship between Malcolm and Lyra, with prompts from trope_bingo
Relationships: Lyra Belacqua/Malcolm Polstead
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	1. Happy ending; undercover missions; everyone thinks we're a couple; torture/interrogation; amnesia

**Author's Note:**

> I'm interested in the relationship between Malcolm and Lyra, and wanted to play with possibilities. Based on the squares from this trope_bingo card, running in order: https://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/403022.html, but I'm sticking to pure drabbles and taking liberties as desired, so the fic isn't posted to the comm. 5 drabbles per chapter.

(happy ending)

Asta purred as Lyra's cold hand found refuge in the rich red fur of her ruff, and Malcolm, watching them from where he stood at the helm of the sloop, felt a tremor move through him from stem to stern at the touch.

Pantalaimon, who had gone on ahead, began to whisper words of gentle affection as the hoop of light that formed Mal's own private aurora rose to encompass his sight.

“Pan says hello,” he called up to the foredeck. Lyra looked back and smiled a dazzling smile. “You come and steer for a bit, until my vision clears.”

(undercover missions)

“I'm a witch, you see,” Lyra said, and then, went on, embellishing her usual excuse for her daemon's absence quite unexpectedly. Malcolm could have swallowed his tongue when she added, “why else would a girl like me have a lover like him? Don't you know that witches stay young for years, while their men get old and gray?”

Malcolm remained silent until they were safely out of the street. Perhaps he should have stayed silent longer, but his vanity rose, stung, to protestation. 

“I'm not that much older than you, you know,” he told his companion, who rolled her eyes.

(everyone thinks we're a couple)

“Have you had any recent letters from Lyra?” Alice's voice was too innocent.

“Not very recent,” he said, returning her butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth affect. “Why would she be writing to me, and not you?”

“You know perfectly well.” Alice leaned back in her chair to skewer him with a gimlet eye.

Malcolm colored; he had Lyra's letter of just last week pressed up against his heart beneath his sweater. 

“She's as bad as you,” he complained later, walking back home, to an unsympathetic Asta. “Why everyone assumes I have some special access to Lyra ...”

“But you do,” Asta said softly, invisible.

(torture/interrogation)

Malcolm blinked back the blood that dripped into his eyes from the cut on his forehead. To no avail. His head was grabbed and roughly wrenched back, held at an uncomfortable angle by the hair. Asta whimpered.

Bonneville advanced on him with a glass eyedropper poised. “This will hurt enough on its own, without your needing to be beaten into submission,” the handsome young man said, but Malcolm could barely hear him over the strong scent of roses rising from the dropper. Sweet enough to drown a man.

He had to stay afloat. Lyra needed him; he must not drown.

(amnesia)

A woman with short, dark hair was tapping his cheek. “Mal, wake up!” she hissed.

He couldn't get his vision to clear; spangles covered everything. “Alice?” he said, and was surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded when he spoke.

“No, it's me, it's Lyra.”

“Lyra? Don't be silly, Lyra's just a baby. Why does everything hurt?”

“I'm sorry,” she said, crouching down beside the chair where he was bound and reaching out to touch his cheek again, more gently this time. “It was me they were after, when they – tortured you.”

“Oh,” he said. “That explains the pain, then.”


	2. Time travel; extortion/blackmail; May/December romance; against all odds; altered states

(time travel)

She was sitting on the bank of the River Thames, down where the urchins struggled for dominance. There was a boy with her, but it was not Roger Parslow, or Billy Costa, or even Will. 

“Do I know you?” he asked. “Only I've never seen you around before. Are you staying at the inn?”

He was a nice-looking boy, stocky, with a shock of coppery hair.

“No,” she said, “I'm from Jordan College.”

“I know Jordan. Gyptians go there in boats. Do you like boats?”

“I dunno. I've mostly traveled in airships.”

He smiled at her, sunshine-bright. “Boats are better.” 

(extortion/blackmail)

Photographs of Lyra were pinned to the wall like moths. Photographs taken at every age: the smiling baby Malcolm remembered from his own childhood, and a wild-looking girl he had never known; the sullen adolescent he'd tried to teach, growing into the young woman towards whom he was beginning to tender – what feelings? Combined, the effect was disturbing.

“Where did you get these?”

“Ah, not happy to see our girl? Your friend Alice can remember back as far as you – or me.”

“It isn't right,” Malcolm growled, “that you should look at Lyra in such a way.”

Delamare only laughed.

(May/December romance)

He could tell that he was flushing; probably his chest and throat had gone red. He'd always been prone to showing his agitation that way, even when he'd been a boy.

The root of the trouble was, he hadn't been that boy for years.

Feeling intensely self-conscious of his gray hairs, and the middle-aged way his waistline tugged at the weave of his cardigan, he looked up at her where she stood like a torch gleaming through the dark.

“Don't you mind it? That I'm not such a young man anymore? You should have someone – like you, vigorous, powerful – ”

(against all odds)

“I had a lover once who was just like me, just exactly in the same second of time, and we bloomed in a moment together and then fate cut him away from me forever. How old am I, Malcolm?”

He averted his eyes. “You're twenty,” he said.

She grabbed his chin, tugging until he looked back. “I don't feel it,” she told him, when he did. “What I feel is that you're the only person in the wide world who's like me, Malcolm Polstead; and that makes me want to be around you. Maybe then I'll understand who I am.”

(altered states)

The rose oil burned like witchfire as Lyra touched it to her bare eye; and then she could see the connection between Mal and Asta, gingery and blazing, even from afar. 

The sight of Dust never grew less beautiful. For a moment she was dizzy and starstruck.

Drawing on what she had been taught, she dove down deep into the stream of light that represented the bond between man and daemon; and then she was shifting through the dimensions again. She let her imagination take control. She knew that where Asta was, she would find what she was looking for.


	3. Friends to enemies; unexpected friendship; fix-it fic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only 3 to this chapter; a free space and a skip.

(friends to enemies)

When Lyra drew a gleaming knife out of her boot and hunkered down into a practiced fighting stance, Malcolm knew he'd made a mistake. 

In the haze of her rose oil vision, she could not distinguish friend from foe. And, clearly, when Lyra Silvertongue had to choose between fight and flight, her battle instincts won. It was the warrior trained by the armored bears and the boy with the knife that he was facing now.

Circling her, he looked for any way to end it quickly and bloodlessly. “Lyra, love, don't do this,” he muttered, not expecting her to hear. 

(unexpected friendship)

“... I really liked it when I first read the book, but now I'm not sure.”

“Yes, it's such a hard thing to know, what information is worth pursuing and what just feels brilliant in the moment. Your mind can be distracted by unacknowledged desires.”

“Like, is this the answer, or do I just like how neatly he wraps it all up?”

“And does he think it's the answer, or is he just selling you a bill of goods?”

Pan, curled up, was telling Asta about the angry girl kept prisoner in the sad, Separated house where the writer lived alone.

(fix-it fic)

As they walked through the blossoms and fronds, Malcolm watched as Lyra's natural golden aura was banked and grew dim. In the Botanical Gardens, she became muted. 

Weighed down by the past, he thought, and then fervently wished that he hadn't been such a useless lump of a graduate student when she'd needed him the most. No girl of twelve should have to witness the horrors she had, his laughing, radiant Lyra least of all.

“Do you think there's any way they could have made it easier on you?” he asked, venturing.

“No,” she answered, and walked on, not speaking.


	4. Secret twin/doppelganger; body swap; secret identities; poor communication skills; crossover

(secret twin/doppelganger)

Lyra was dreaming again about the cat daemon who she thought was Kirjava. The creature walked ahead of her in a semi-obscuring blaze of sunlight, and Lyra followed after. 

It was not until the daemon had nearly reached her human – how had she gone so far from him? And where, oh where, Lyra wondered frantically, was her own Pan? – that she realized her error.

The cat wasn't Kirjava. Lyra could clearly recognize Asta, as she took a flying leap up into Malcolm's arms where he stood waiting.

How had she never perceived the resemblance between the two female felines before?

(body swap)

One on side of the world, Pantalaimon rode curled around Malcolm Polstead's neck. It was cold and gloomy in Brytain, and both were glad of the nearness and the warmth the other provided.

On the other, Lyra Belaqua walked beside Malcolm's Asta, their two shadows pacing along ahead of them on the desert sands.

For all four, there was a feeling of rightness, and of wrongness, of nearness and of distance, of satisfaction and of pain. But better to go thus paired than it would have been for any of them, human or daemon, to be seen alone and Separated.

(secret identities)

To Dame Delamare's perception, Lyra Belaqua's other name wasn't Silvertongue, but the name her daughter had given up when she married Edward Coulter. A useless man. Just as well the girl hadn't been saddled with his name, when she was a proper granddaughter of her grandmother, if only she knew it. The old lady's lizard daemon smiled.

Even though no one he knew would have thought of him that way, Malcolm Polstead never did manage to forget the truth that he had committed a murder. At the bottom of a heart, still he always knew himself a killer, in secret.

(poor communication skills)

“Your conclusion here doesn't seem tethered to your evidence,” Malcolm pointed out, indicating with his pen – only to find his pupil gazing out the window, her daemon on the windowsill chittering at the starlings. “Lyra, can you tell me your line of reasoning?”

“Um,” she said unhelpfully. “Spose I just didn't think carefully enough. Sorry.”

“That's not – Lyra, if you won't work with me, I don't know how I can help you with this.”

“Sorry,” the girl muttered, shrinking down, and he wanted to kick himself, and also to scream. “I don't mean to be a bother.”

“Are you _sure_?”

(crossover)

“This pill makes you smaller, this one makes you tall,” the big ginger cat with the round belly caroled from his perch in the hornbeam tree. “And rose oil makes you no one, Lyra, no one at all.”

“It's like being asleep again, with my mother, in the Valley of Rainbows. Or like reading the alethiometer with Olivier Bonneville's method. I learn things, real things, but they do feel tainted. Do I keep on, or do I turn back?”

“Poor little Alice through the Looking-Glass,” the cat said, somehow both Malcolm and Asta, all rolled into one. “Who can tell?”


	5. Role reversal; immortality/reincarnation; truth or dare; handcuffed/bound together; rites of passage/coming of age

(role reversal)

Lyra had started to realize, as she'd journeyed across Asia, just how much Malcolm Polstead had always done to protect and care for her. He'd killed for her when she was just a baby, and even when she'd been a sulky child, had been patient and available.

She wasn't used, at all, to him needing care from her.

The aura had come on him rapidly, his “spangled ring” rising up to overwhelm his vision, and he could not leave the hotel room, sensitive to light and scent. His voice rasped like sandpaper in the dimmed room.

She did her best.

(immortality/reincarnation)

“If there really are alternate worlds, I wonder if there's be one where I stayed with Will, where we disobeyed the angel, or were somehow cleverer and figured out a way to not be separated. Is that other Lyra happier? If she is, maybe I ought to be happy for her.”

Malcolm only trusted himself to murmur a short response, saying that he hoped her other selves had what they wanted, as he hoped she did, in her own life. But his heart felt selfish, and wanted to be the destiny waiting for her at the end of every road.

(truth or dare)

“I won't ask you for truth, Lyra, because I love you for a liar. But I'll dare you a dare, one overgrown river rat to another. I dare you to live this life like you mean it, with all of your body, mind, and soul. Hold your past and present loves, your rational doubts and your secret commonwealth, in your mind and heart, all of them at once, with all their contradictions; and you just be, girl. Be, without threat of self-annihilation, without limit to the scope of you. Set free, that spirit of yours will bridge worlds by itself.”

(handcuffed/bound together)

The irons that chained their wrists together kept her still, listening to his dare-cum-confession, when in other times she might have flitted away, bird-like, to less uncomfortable regions of the air. Now, she couldn't get away from the palpable reality of Malcolm's emotions, apparent in every tone of his warm voice; and couldn't do much to ignore the response of her own body, either.

What a tangled web we weave when first we premise to deceive. Without the ability to run away from him, she couldn't keep pretending that she didn't hear the words he wasn't yet able to say.

(rites of passage/coming of age)

The first touch of Malcolm's gentle, work-roughened hands on the softness of Pan's pelt was an electric shock.

The sensation of Asta's fur under Lyra's fingertips was the caress of warm sunlight.

“You smell of roses,” Malcolm rumbled, low as a great deep purr, and she smiled.

“I've been watching the past, minding the future.”

“Be with me here, then, for a little while at least, in the present.”

“It's not the first time I've done this,” she confessed.

“Nor I,” he responded. “Of course not. That's not for people like us, who've Separated and survived to tell the tale.”


End file.
